-
As the detail of the Budget continues to be analysed it’s increasingly clear that far from delivering Christmas, the Chancellor opted for Halloween. While headlines initially focused on the changes to National Insurance and Child Benefit, overall the Budget has left households £870 worse off, with tax cuts giving back only half of people’s increasing…
-
They say that imitation is the greatest form of flattery, in which case the Conservatives’ partial imitation of Labour proposals for increasing Government revenue must at least be party flattering for the Labour Party. As I said earlier, much of the Budget had already been leaked, so it came as little surprise when the Chancellor…
-
Ahead of Wednesday’s Budget, Crawley Labour is calling on the Chancellor to reverse plans to abolish the Household Support Fund. The Fund is designed to help families hit by the cost of living crisis. Over the last year, local households struggling to make ends meet received support worth £9,740,724, but now ministers seem determined to…
-
Once upon a time, there was an expectation that Governments did not leak budget announcements. Indeed, this expectation was so serious that even the suspicion that a Chancellor had leaked the contents of a budget it was grounds for resignation. While the expectation is still there that pre-announcing a budget before it is delivered to…
-
The Household Support Fund is due to end this month, following the decision of the Chancellor amongst all the coverage of his Autumn Statement to quietly drop the scheme. The Household Support Fund is an £842m fund to help families with food and energy costs. Incredibly, despite an ongoing cost of living crisis, the Chancellor…
-
As commuters return to work this morning, they will be find themselves greeted once again by higher ticket prices, with the annual government-approved fare increase having taken place over the weekend. While this year’s 4.9% price increase is roughly in-line with inflation, it comes after years of above-inflation fare increases under the Conservatives, which have…
-
Today is the third National Day of Reflection, a day dedicated to remembering those who were lost during the pandemic. It’s easy to look back on the early years of COVID-19 as an odd time that we all went through, but the reality is that many of our fellow citizens never emerged from the pandemic…
-
The latest waiting list figures for the Surrey and Sussex NHS Healthcare NHS Trust, responsible for providing NHS hospital services in the Crawley area, show 45.1% of patients are not being seen within 18 weeks. The NHS operational standard requires that 92% of patients receive treatment within this window. NHS waiting lists have trebled since…
-
Of the 861 dental surgeries who have provided a recent update in the South East, 87.6% are not currently accepting any new adult patients. The collapse of NHS dentistry has left millions of patients unable to get an appointment when they need one. Analysis of patient survey data suggests that last year, 4.75 million people…
-
The latest figures from the Ministry of Justice this month reveal that 218 local families have now faced no-fault ejections from their home since April 2019, when the Conservative Government promised to ban the practice. Across the country the total is now approaching 90,000 households. ‘No-fault evictions’, also known as Section 21 notices, allow landlords…
Peter Lamb for Crawley 